Braitenbergs Vehicles, Searles Chinese room, and Coles Virtual Minds” - some thoughts on thinking machines.
Some selections from Valentino Braitenberg’s “Vehicles” - http://www1.appstate.edu/~kms/classes/psy5150/Documents/Braitenberg1984.pdf
Alan Turing’s fantastic 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” - http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf
John Searle’s paper, cited over 5000 times, about the Chinese Room argument - http://www.class.uh.edu/phil/garson/mindsbrainsandprograms.pdf
David Cole’s “Artificial Intelligence and Personal Identity,” where he posits the mechanism of virtual minds - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.383.778andrep=rep1andtype=pdf
A quick note: the response that I end up advocating in the end here is spiritually similar to a sort of philosophical “Pragmatism.” If you’d like to read some more about it, check out its entry in the SEP here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/
The SEP article on “functionalism,” one of the philosophies of mind characterized here - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/